Religious Extremism in Leila Alami's Hope and other Dangerous Pursuits

  Fatine’s religiosity in Alami’s Hope and other Dangerous Pursuits does pose questions on the sources of religious extremism. Taking into account her disadvantaged social background as she hails from a very poor family, Fatine finds herself agentless. Class oppression deprived her of agency. Thus, in search for a meaningful existence which would reflect her self-worth, Fatine found a safe haven in religion. Her choice of embracing religion insofar as that she became a fanatic is a reaction against social hypocrisy and an attempt to voice her vengeance and not a choice which was based on conviction. This moots a heated debate as to what extent religious people are sincere in their religiosity and not escapists from harsh realities. In other words, religion becomes a refuge from one’s frustrations in life and not a sign of piety.

   Islamic countries are swamped with illiteracy, corruption, poverty, terrorism and other social ills, which may push foreigners to associate Islam with backwardness and retardance. Many uneducated observers point their fingers to Islam as the cause of such social problems. To be objective, one cannot lump all these troubles in the basket of Islam. Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance and integrity. This might seem paradoxical. I believe that muslims are partially the ones to blame for creating contradictions in their practice of the religion. I agree that factors such as ignorance, conspiracy of international powers, autocracy and the political manipulation of the religious discourse all interplay to produce the current situation, but muslims themselves assume also a responsibility of smearing islam into a religion of fanaticism and backwardness. That is to say, they cling on to religion only to make up for things they could not bear on the ground or had failed to address. These things may range from emotional void, psychological vicissitudes to financial hardships. Islam provides for its followers a comfort zone in such hard times. It gives them a space of hope and commiseration that this worldly life is not permanent and that a better life in the hereafter is awaiting those who were patient and stoic. There is nothing wrong with this comfort zone except when it is turned into a freezer of one’s life passively waiting for miracles to intercept their misery. Hurling one’s troubles in that comfort zone in order to just enjoy inner peace or relieve the pain is weakness, selfishness and hypocrisy yielding a feeble, hazy and fragile faith which will be easily sacrificed when life’s temptations knock he door. That’s why we may find someone who prays but steals, who performed pilgrimage but deceives and who veils her face but gossips, because their religious rituals are devoid of the spirit of Islam, their piousness is fake as their refuge to religion had not been on conviction but just to escape the agonizing experiences. Religion, then, becomes opium to one’s hardships, a peg to hang one’s misery on.

   In conclusion, the comfort zone that Islam provides allures feeble believers to take advantage of to the detriment of the virtuous core. Islam is abused when its followers observe it only to seek security or treatment.

Modernism & Islamic Feminism

By Assem ALMOUSSAOUI (Student in Gender Studies MA program)  

  

   It often hits my mind the idea of a possible co-existence between modernism and religion. Feminism, as a modernist movement, seeks to rebel against sexist, rotten and traditional patriarchal society. Take the Arab world, for instance, where religion is in most cases the ascendant. Westerners and modernist easterners alike attack Islam for oppressing muslim women in various aspects of life. Polygyny, veiling and inheritance, to name a few, are considered as legalized forms of persecution perpetrated against muslim women under the disguise of religious sanctity. Nevertheless, we find some women who unabashedly adhere to the feminist movement and struggle for equality within the religious Islamic framework. The problem which arises here is that of congruency between Islam and feminism, as modernism in its core is based on rejecting metaphysical beliefs which cannot be scientifically proven and on embracing a new lifestyle which should cope with new demands of the industrialization phase. Thus, should Islam and feminism be looked at as antithetical?

   The incompatibility looms large once gender roles are brought to the fore. Gender roles in Islam are mandated to be complementary as a ship with two different captains is doomed to sink. In that complementarity relationship, man is seen as the one who is more liable to lead and be the bread-winner of the family while the woman is branded with being sensitive, physically weak and emotional. Thus, equality between men and women, which feminists regurgitate all day-long, is absent in the Islamic teachings. By no stretch of the imagination would feminists capitulate to such principle as it is seen patriarchal and does not take into account the modern economic changes which require women to be workers, leaders and nation builders, and not imprisoned into constricted jobs. What man can do woman also can do. That’s the motto of feminism above all. Negating, or even just limiting, her agency is a negation of her existence. Here, Islamic feminism comes to be caught in a double-bind situation. Should women’s struggle to bettering women’s lives under the umbrella of Islam be necessarily painted as feminist? Or should these women activists throw away that umbrella and claim themselves as modernist feminists but under the torrential rain of scolding from religious scholars and leaders? Is there a way out from such existential dilemma?

   The challenge for muslim women either to be modernist or remain traditionalist is a false and displaced debate. The frame within which the debate is tackled reflects the westerner’s imperialist hegemony. As in the 1840s India, the British imperialism enacted the abolishing of the sati practice describing it as savage and inhuman. Apologists for the British colonization of India boasted of the civilizing mission the colonizer burdened itself with and which was embodied in the fact of annulling the sati. Spivack, however, contends that abolishing was imposed on religious Indian women who wanted to observe their Hinduism and who considered self-immolation to be martyrdom and a duty not a suicide or death penalty. The colonizer meddled in religious affairs and imposed its perspective about that religious practice without getting down to earth so as to try to fathom the cultural sensibilities of Hindus. It is an act of silencing the subalterns. By the same token, Islamic feminists are victims of the West meddling into the affairs of the East. By imposing the western model of women’s emancipation, that is feminism, ‘Islamic feminists’ allowed the west to trample over our own belief system and to silence the majority. A majority who believes in absolute divine-justice as far as gender roles are concerned.

   To conclude, it is true that muslim women are afflicted by the misunderstanding of certain religious texts and the overlapping of traditions and customs with the religion, but such injustices can, indeed, be corrected under the umbrella of Islam. An umbrella which can be opened only on complementarity between men and women and not on rivalry. Seen from such outlook, adding Islamic to feminism is a subtle confession that Islam is oppressive to women. It is time to celebrate our own capacity to solve our problems  and unfetter ourselves from the complex of inferiority to the west.